20 Essential Tweaks and Tips Every Firefox User Should Know

Make use of the Favicon

The favicon -- a website’s shortcut icon – is pretty to look at, but for the most part is pretty useless. Firefox lets you click the favicon next to a site’s URL in the location bar to display identity information, but most sites don’t utilize this feature. However, you can use the favicon as a quick way to access and manage stored cookies for specific websites. Just hit the “more information” button after clicking a favicon to open up that site’s page information window. Here, you can view and delete individual cookies for just this site, and even access saved passwords stored for users. It’s a really sneaky way to steal someone’s email password if you’re using their computer.

Manage Auto-Complete Suggestions

Forget to turn on private browsing mode and leave an embarrassing site in your URL history? You can delete individual auto-complete suggestions by hovering your mouse over the suspect URL and pressing the Delete key (not backspace) on your keyboard. The same trick also works for stored search history in your search bar, or any other auto-complete forms like user login.

Download like a Pro

From our power downloading guide: The Alpha and the Omega of downloading extensions, DownThemAll! is as simple to use as its name implies. When you activate this add-on for a page you're surfing, DownThemAll gives you a list of every potential downloadable item on the page--everything from ZIP archives to JPEG images. You can grab the entire page's contents and dump them in a folder, or you can selectively filter for only the file extensions that you're actually interested in. Never before has pilfering the entire contents of a Web site been quite so easy.

I understand this article was written more than a year ago but please take down the portion of this article concerning the about:config tweaks. The only difference that I noticed, as most others did, was that Firefox was now significantly slower. I've been a subscriber for a while and know that slowing down PC's is not one of your goals. I applaud you for having an extensive and easily accessible online archive; but since this isn't fine literature I believe removing or at least correcting the faulty information would only serve to enhance the value of this vast trove of information. I am not asking that you review every article ever written, just the ones that people complain about. If articles like this, about improving a popular product were kept up-to-date, they would be of great service.

I'd add another under the "14 Essential Keyboard Shortcuts" to make it 15. On shortcut I find very useful is Ctrl + either + or - to increase or decrease font/page viewing size.

Also, another add-on I really like is Adblock Plus. Also, since I like to have lots of tabs open at once, I find Tabs Open Relative (which makes your tabs always open just right of the tabe you open it from so that you don't have to go scrolling over to the far right to access it) and Aging Tabs (which helps you to see which tabs you've accessed most recently).

Had the same problems. But a lot of my extensions had been updated recently and so I had to disable all of them to see if it was one of them. Turns out it was just the about:config tweaks. I only did the first few (before the pipelining ones) and still had the problems. Too bad.

Yeah, going to have to go with everyone else on this one, the about:config changes made me have to use IE for a day or two until I got FF back to the way it was. It would be fine for a minute or two but then pages would not load or would take MINUTES to load. :(

Firefox 3.5.5 became s sludge bucket after implementing the speed tweaks on my very fast Vista64 machine. Your could go eat lunch waiting for pages to load, Had to undo them to get back to normal (fast) speed. Waste of time for me, at least. Very bad advice.

Tried these settings and it ruined my browser. i had to keep restarting Firefox because nothing would load. Restored back to default...... for those who need to do the same, just open the Start Menu and type.....

firefox -safe-mode ....... then just check the box to restore default preferences and restart.

Everything was fine until a day or so later & just like some others, Firefox loaded very slowly & couldnt play any form of online video. I had to completely reinstall Firefox which is a headache if you have a thousand bookmarks like myself. Thanks though & maybe others will have better luck.

The only keyboard shortcut I actually ever use is to hit the forward slash key "/" to open up the quick find bar at the bottom of the page. It's just like the find bar except it auto hides when you stop using it, and you have to know the keyboard shortcuts to move up and down through the things youv'e found (F3 to find next). It's pretty sweet!

Careful what you do with the about:config. Screwed up my firefox and it took forever to load pages (fast with every other browser). It worked for some people so just make sure it will work before you jump gung-ho with all the commands.

I never knew about the Ctrl-F to find a specific text on a webpage..... ive wanted to do that for so many things, but never knew you could. I also didnt know you could change the 'mailto' setting to Gmail instead.... thats a huge save for me. Excellent article. Very informative.

most of these tricks are good, but the one to use About:config in order to enable Autofill makes it nearly impossible to type anything in the URL bar, as Firefox keeps trying to autofill it-with the wrong things!

I tried all the about:config tweaks mentioned above (minus the proxy server ones), but ran into an issue with being able to load videos on hulu.com. I have not identified exactly which setting it was yet, but if you're an avid hulu consumer, be careful, and remember which settings you used.

I've stopped using Firefox since switching to Windows 7. The new thumbnail preview of your tabs is really awesome, and works in every other browser besides firefox. I really miss some of the simple features of Firefox, and can't wait until they finally add support for the Win 7 Thumbnail previews of tabs. Anyone know of when that might be available?

Thanks a lot, really :-) Now almost all my websites "Even the Heavy ones like G4" take only 1 to 3 seconds to fully load. I've noticed a significant boost in speed after following your instructions. THANKS! & now I can continue to look at Bridget Regans legs on G4 with even more speed. SET FOR LUDRICRIS SPEED